Originally Posted by
kumduh
I was assigned to read this book for a history class, and it had some paragraphs that I found to be very profound.
"Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the hunger and thirst, that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair ... within five minutes begins the distribution of bread, of bread-Brot-Broid-chleb-pain-lechem-keynér, of the holy grey slab which seems gigantic in your neighbor's hand, and in your own hand so small as to make you cry. It is a daily hallucination to which in the end one becomes accustomed: but at the beginning it is so irresistible that many of us, after long discussions on our own open and constant misfortune and the shameless luck of others, finally exchange our ration, at which the illusion is renewed inverted, leaving everyone discontented and frustrated."
-Primo Levi, If this is a man: Survival in Auschwitz